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Jazztopad 2016, Part 1

Wroclaw was this year's European Capital of Culture, sharing that title with Donostia/San Sebastian, a landmark of importance. But it isn't the only distinctive 'C' connected with the annual Jazztopad festival organized by the National Forum of Music, the representative center of musical culture in Poland. High-ranking commissions, international collaborations and sharp artistic choices form the other important C's (for the C's see also my report of last year's edition). This year's edition presented three commissions: "Wind" by Jason Moran, "The Unfolding" by Wayne Shorter and "We Are Crying" by Polish pianist/composer Marcin Masecki. The commissions are reviewed by Yahvé M. de la Cavada in a second article. The present article reviews the Canadian, Australian and especially the Japanese collaboration in the second week of the festival.

Triosm (Canada, USA, Australia)

Tuesday and Wednesday night of the festival's second week offered three trios, one without a bass and two without a horn, equating to two basses in the game, that of Brad Jones and that of Lloyd Swanton. And as we know the bass is a crucial game maker. Tuesday started off, in the Black Hall, with the trio of guitarist Gordon Grdina, drummer Kenton Loewen and clarinetist Francois Houle from Vancouver followed by the New Yorkian trio of pianist Aruán Ortiz, culminating the next day with legendary Australian trio The Necks presenting its vibes entering the third decade.

Gordon Grdina (1977) is one of the few fully dual musicians on western electric guitar and eastern acoustic lute, the ûd. With great self-assurance he covers a broad range, from rock to traditional Near Eastern music, as well as bop-based and faced jazz but also raucous free improvisation. He is inside as well as outside when he is playing (something he has in common with Marc Ribot). His guitar playing is influenced by ûd-sonorities as his ûd playing by rock-and jazz-sonorities. At the core of his guitar playing, however, is a firm jazz flow enabling him to merge raucousness with a soaring voice into a climaxing explosion. In that quality he often sounds like a saxophonist. His trio with bassist Tommy Babin and drummer Kenton Loewen is one of the most longstanding on the Vancouver scene, especially his partnership with drummer Kenton Loewen. Loewen is a heavily propulsive drummer, bashing and splitting as counterpart of Grdina. But also the intense and continuous collaboration and partnership with clarinetist François Houle (1961) is a long-standing one. Houle, a genuine clarinet clarinetist, is one of the key figures of the Vancouver scene. It was Steve Lacy who helped him discover the clarinet is his thing and made him decide to focus exclusively on 'his' instrument. As a consequence Houle is striving to extend the sound of his instrument, for instance by using parts of it as sound source or by using electronic emulation or distortion like he did in "Lemmium," the concluding piece of their performance dedicated to Lemmy Kilmister, who recently passed away, the bassist of notorious metal band Motörhead. In "Lemmium" Houle enriched the music by emulating something of a heavy bass guitar.

The threesome navigated through a wider landscape of sound with meandering lyrical passages, encircling eerie plateaus and sudden about-turns into wild abysses triggering raucous rides and accumulation of sound that went hazy and eventually dissolved, giving leeway to bouncing, hard hitting maneuvers. It sounded familiar to the Wroclaw audience with respect to elements of it, but the whole, its emergence, the lively live shaping with a right-in-your-face mentality was an overwhelming new thing that was revealed too in the appearance the following night at Mleczarnia club (next door at Pawła Włodkowica nr. 5).

In recent years Brooklyn pianist Aruan Ortiz (1973), originally from Santiago de Cuba, consequently developed into a resistant distinctive voice. In Wroclaw it quickly became apparent he has his very own, intriguing way of working with repetition and variation as was already manifested on his latest album Hidden Voices with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Gerald Cleaver (on Swiss Intakt label). During the tour the Wroclaw appearance was part of, Ortiz played that music with a different trio, namely with bassist Brad Jones and drummer Chad Taylor, two top notch musicians operating on the same level as those of the recording but each bringing in their own characteristics.

I love jazz because is intense, human, creative.
I was first exposed to jazz by Bitches Brew a Miles Davis record.
The best show I ever attended was Michael Brecker Quartet with Joey Calderazzo, James Genus and Jeff Tain Watts at Punta del Este Jazz Festival.
The first jazz record I bought was Heavy Weather by Weather Report.